Springfield hotel rolls out complimentary goldfish service

Jun. 15, 2012

Springfield's University Plaza hotel allows guests to keep a goldfish in their room. / Submitted photo

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When it comes to hotel amenities, you might expect to have wireless internet, a coffee maker and fresh towels in your room. But Springfield’s University Plaza Hotel is offering an amenity you might not expect: complimentary goldfish service.

Since mid-May, the hotel has given guests the option of having one of the hotel’s four goldfish in their room during their stay. According to General Manager Robert Henley, the program was the result of a hotel management brainstorming session. One person mentioned that he had stayed at a hotel offering goldfish service eight or nine years ago.

“We’re always looking for unique things to do for our guests,” Henley.

Hotel staff take care of delivering the fish, which come in a large bowl with multicolored gravel, to the room, in addition to feeding them. While hotel staff assumed that the program would be most popular with parents traveling with their children, Henley estimated that half of the people who get a goldfish in their room are businessmen and women.

“They’re hardly ever at the front desk,” Henley said of the demand.

While goldfish service is far from widespread, the Kimpton hotel chain has offered goldfish service at their Hotel Monaco properties in major cities for over a decade. And the service regularly gets mentioned when guests review their stays online. One guest at the Portland property wrote on TripAdvisor that her fish was “a calming ‘friend’ during my stay,” and a guest at the Washington, D.C., hotel said of the service, “How cool is that?”

Henley and University Plaza staff tried to take their service a step further by giving the fish names and a complete history, which they describe on their Facebook page. The description of Chip, for example, lists its favorite music as the blues, and says “I swam down from Chicago to be with you.”

While no online reviews have mentioned the hotel’s goldfish service just yet, Henley said it has been frequently mentioned on the survey that the hotel asks guests to fill out when they leave.

Complimentary goldfish service is just one of several new programs the hotel has implemented recently, including adding local grown food and beer to hotel eateries along with pet friendly packages.